US President Donald Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric and focus on the grievances of white voters helped him win the 2016 election. But a Reuters analysis of public opinion over the last four years suggests that Trump’s brand of white identity politics may be less effective in the 2020 election campaign.
The analysis comes amid widespread criticism of Trump’s racially charged comments about four minority women lawmakers and the fallout from a mass shooting of Hispanics in El Paso, Texas, that many Democratic presidential candidates swiftly blamed on the president’s rhetoric.
Reuters/Ipsos polling of 4,436 US adults in July showed that people who rejected racial stereotypes were more interested in voting in the 2020 general election than those who expressed stronger levels of anti-black or anti-Hispanic biases.
The Reuters analysis shows that Trump’s narrow win came at a time when Americans with strong anti-black opinions were the more politically engaged group. While Reuters did not measure anti-Hispanic biases in 2016, political scientists say that people who express them closely overlap with those who are biased against other racial minorities.
This year’s poll found that among Americans who feel that blacks and whites are equal, or that blacks are superior to whites, 82 per cent expressed a strong interest in voting in 2020. That was 7 percentage points higher than people who feel strongly that whites are superior to blacks.
“There is some indication that racial liberals are more energised than the racially intolerant,” said University of Michigan political scientist Vincent Hutchings, who reviewed Reuters’ findings. “That would seem to be good news for the Democrats and bad news for the Republicans.”
The July poll did have a silver lining for Trump. Most white Republicans approve of his performance in office. And over the past four years they have become increasingly supportive of his signature issue: expanding the wall along the US-Mexico border. Some 82 per cent now support it compared to 75 per cent last year.
Trump is clearly still as popular as ever with conservatives who dominate the predominantly white, working-class communities that helped him win in 2016, said Duke University political scientist Ashley Jardina, who also reviewed the poll findings.
In his 2016 campaign, Trump focused on the grievances of white voters who feared the global economy was leaving them behind and who wanted more restrictions on immigration. He employed put-downs of Latino immigrants and inner-city, typically black, residents.
He said then that Mexicans were “murderers”, and as recently as last year, Trump labeled illegal immigration to the United States an “invasion.” Trump has asserted repeatedly that his words are not meant to be racially divisive. “I think my rhetoric... brings people together,” he said earlier this month.
Responding to the Reuters polling analysis, a spokesman for Trump’s reelection campaign, Daniel Bucheli, said the president “enjoys broad support from diverse groups of Americans, and this coalition of supporters, to include minorities and first time voters, continues to grow daily.” “If there is something we’ve come to learn about President Trump is that he calls it like it is,” Bucheli said, when asked about Trump’s recent comments about the lawmakers and others.
The White House did not respond to a request for comment on the poll findings.
The Reuters analysis also found that Americans were less likely to express feelings of racial anxiety this year, and they were more likely to empathise with African Americans. This was also true for white Americans and whites without a college degree, who largely backed Trump in 2016.
— Reuters
Chris Kahn
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